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Ghost writing link to medical journals

Nick Miller

AT LEAST one article submitted to Australia's leading medical journal in recent years was ''ghost written'' by a writer employed by a drug or medical device company, its editor says.

Martin van der Weyden, editor of the Medical Journal of Australia, has called for a government-funded investigation into the influence that industry has on research papers.

However, he believes the problem in Australia is not nearly as bad as in North America, where there is a scandal over the extent of ghost writing in leading medical journals.

Last week Mr van der Weyden attended a conference in Vancouver where startling research was presented that claimed up to one in 10 articles published in prestigious medical journals were ghost written by uncredited industry-sponsored writers.

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Through an anonymous online questionnaire of the authors of 630 articles, the researchers found 7.8 per cent acknowledged substantial contributions to their articles by people not listed as authors.

The rate ranged from 2 per cent in the journal, Nature Medicine, to 10.9 per cent in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The authors said the work of industry-sponsored writers may introduce bias, affecting treatment decisions by doctors and patient care.

US lawsuits uncovered ghost written medical research studies for the drug Vioxx, which was pulled from the market in 2004 over evidence linking it to heart attacks. And documents released in the US revealed that drug company Wyeth paid ghost writers to produce medical journal articles favourable to its hormone replacement therapy Prempro, after a study found the drug raised the risk of breast cancer.

The company commissioned a medical writing company to draft the research, then set about finding an academic author who would put their name to it. Editors of the journal, PLoS Medicine, who obtained the documents, wrote this month that ghost writing was the ''dirty little secret'' of medical publishing and had become ''a pervasive presence''.

''Drug companies and medical education and communication companies have built a vast and profitable ghost-writing industry,'' they said. ''[It amounts to] systematic manipulation and abuse of scholarly publishing by the pharmaceutical industry and its commercial partners in their attempt to influence the health care decisions of physicians and the general public.

''What, a cynical reader might ask, can I truly trust as being unbiased? The answer is that, sadly, for some or even many journal articles, we just don't know.''

Mr van der Weyden said pharmaceutical companies had a far smaller influence on research in Australia, but he had to stay on alert for telltale signs of their influence on submitted articles.

''We don't have stats on ghost writing [but] I am aware of one instance in the last five years which was detected on appraisal of the article,'' he said.

Citing ''author confidentiality'', he declined to say who wrote the article or when, but he said it was in a letter submitted to the MJA, and the style of writing had given away that the letter ''was drafted by a medical communication firm''.